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Name: Dalsgård, Anne Line
Home Country:
Denmark
Research Country: Brazil
Project period: 1997-2000
Type: Ph.D. thesis
Title
Matters of Life and Longing. Female Sterilisation in Northeast Brazil
Abstract
The thesis "Matters of Life and Longing" is based on eleven months of fieldwork in a low-income neighbourhood in the outskirts of the city Recife in Northeast Brazil. It describes women's motives for accepting and often actively seeking sterilisation and it centres on the individual subject and her lifeworld.
The argument is phenomenological in its focus on lived experience and subjective meaning. But by situating fertility and sterilisation in the existential dilemma of autonomy and dependency, the discussion links individual agency, hopes and longings to historical processes and forces of power and economy.
In this complexity sterilisation turns out to be both a symptom of violent constraints and a resource – a means by which women gain control in their own lives.
This study is about female sterilisation in a low-income neighbourhood in Northeast Brazil. It is about women's motives for accepting – and often actively seeking – sterilisation and it centers on the individual subject and her lifeworld! In this subjective world sterilisation proves to be just the tip of an iceberg; it acquires its particular meaning within a wider context of poverty, disrespect and constrained agency.
The analytical focus of the study is on recognition as a human need. Based on works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, William James, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schutz, Michael Jackson and Nick Crossley and with the point of departure in Hegel's notion of recognition, the study interprets the women's striving for sterilisation as a search for social acknowledgement. The argument is phenomenological in its focus on lived experience and subjective meaning. But by situating fertility and sterilisation in the existential dilemma of autonomy and dependency, the discussion includes the contested field of social relations shaped by forces of political economy beyond the immediate lifeworld.
Initially I describe fertility and motherhood in the context of everyday violence, where sterilisation provides a sense of control in the uncertain lives of the poor. Maternal sentiments are prominent in this description as I see emotion as synthetic of the social and the individual psychological order (Lyon and Barbalet 1994:63), turning collective norms and values into personal matters and bringing motivation into action. The structural violence of having to act while being impotent is central in this introduction to local perceptions of motherhood, and I argue that moments of loss and helplessness give direction and force to the women's efforts to change their lives and the lives of their children.
I move on to describe the structural changes of the Brazilian society in which the women in focus have become losers except in one area: they have gained the right to de- fine and work upon their lives by means of modem medicine. With the right follows a discourse on individual responsibility and submission to medical authority, which .runs through the women's reproductive histories. My argument centre s on the inferiority that the women reel in meetings with better-off Brazilians, such as the staff at public hospitals. I link this sense of inferiority to the experience of the body as betraying and without value and I describe how women impose change, symbolic well as real, upon their bodies in a search for the recognition they are denied by their inferior status. Finally, I argue that the motivation for sterilisation must be understood in the context of the immediate lifeworld of family and neighbours with its endeavours and frustrations. Within the multiple concerns of a woman's lire sterilisation relieves immediate pressures and endows her with recognition as a responsible mother. However, it does not fundamentally alter problematic relationships and leaves her with a longing for more than a surgical intervention in itself can bring.
Rather than seeing sterilisation as simply a method of birth control I argue that for the women in focus it constitutes a hope for control in one’s own life.
Involved research institution(s)
Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Supervisor(s)
Professor Susan Whyte, Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Correspondence
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